Posted by NC on 11/17/07 04:52

On Nov 16, 1:31 pm, Mark Space <marksp...@sbc.global.net> wrote:
> NC wrote:
> > ...on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on
> > loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via
> > Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn't look much different, but
> > hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably
> > poky site performance.
>
> > http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-php/
>
> " This is a funny result. I am my self a PHP enthusiast, but in the
> journal “ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 31 Issue
> 3″ there was an article called “A performance comparison of dynamic Web
> technologies” where Perl, Java server technolgy (also tomcat) and Perl
> was benchmarked in a labratory environment. It was concluded that
> Serverside Java outpreformed PHP and Perl by a factor 8. "

Wow... Or is it supposed to be "Huh"? :)

Here's the actual abstract of that article:

Today, many Web sites dynamically generate responses "on the fly"
when user requests are received. In this paper, we experimentally
evaluate the impact of three different dynamic content technologies
(Perl, PHP, and Java) on Web server performance. We quantify
achievable performance first for static content serving, and then
for dynamic content generation, considering cases both with and
without database access. The results show that the overheads of
dynamic content generation reduce the peak request rate supported
by a Web server up to a factor of 8, depending on the workload
characteristics and the technologies used. In general, our results
show that Java server technologies typically outperform both Perl
and PHP for dynamic content generation, though performance under
overload conditions can be erratic for some implementations.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=974036.974037
&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&idx=J618&part=newsletter&WantType=Newsletters
&title=ACM%20SIGMETRICS%20Performance%20Evaluation%20Review
&CFID=6782527&CFTOKEN=17180559

As you can see, "the factor of 8" refers to serving static content
outperforming dynamic content generation, not to Java outperforming
PHP and Perl... Note also that the article mentions Java's erratic
performance under overload conditions for some implementations...

Cheers,
NC

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